The Scottish threat

Has the return of the Scottish parliament changed the way the monarchy is seen? In one sense, hardly at all; yet in another, it threatens to change everything, and in a relatively foreseeable future.

Her Majesty of course inaugurated the parliament in 1998, and with a certain grace meant to endear her anew to northern subjects. These included the editor-in-chief of the Scotsman, Mr Andrew Neil, who was seen to go weak at the knees while commenting on the event for BBC Scotland. This once stalwart republican even forecast "a new style of monarchy for the 21st century".

But the new style was soon in trouble. Because of the large Catholic vote in Scotland, all Scottish parties have a common interest in combating sectarianism, and the new assembly unanimously decided the Windsors were delinquents in this regard. The campaign was backed by Michael Forsyth, a former Tory secretary of state. The modern crown rests upon the infamous 1701 Act of Settlement, which declared that no individual of the Catholic faith should ever again occupy a British throne. Could any sane multicultural court of the present do anything but condemn such discrimination? Surely it was time for Holyrood and Westminster to join in repealing the anachronism?

With unexampled haste and glibness, Blair declined this honour. No parliamentary time, far too many consultations needed, not within the Scottish remit, and emphatically not the kind of thing middle England wanted to hear about. He had not reprieved the Windsors from Diana-fever, merely to subvert them from another direction. Also, an untarnished Queen would be required to open the Millenium Dome.

This fire-hose of platitudes omitted something quite important. The Act of Settlement is one item in the rather meagre written part of the British constitution, alongside the less picturesque Treaty of Union of 1706-7. In fact, it was a necessary condition of the latter. In fact, it was just too damn close to the spinal column of "all we hold dear". There are, after all, extremists around (not all Scots) who believe that a modern written constitution would be better for the United Kingdom (or the United Whatever-it-is), and ought to replace these heirlooms altogether. Some of them even think it was a precondition of devolved government, and that without it devolution is sure to break down.

Such lunatics are at odds (sometimes unknowingly) with the very soul of the United Kingdom. The third way pines for regeneration, not wholesale replacement. It wants a monarch kind to Muslims and Buddhists, not a soulless republic. Having transformed local government into "local government" through devolution, it now has little time for upstarts with ideas exceeding their non-sovereign status. The crown should support a given dispensation of authority, not become a lever of possible alteration.

The Scottish parliament's appeal on the 1701 act was intended reasonably, as a gesture of atonement. In reality, it was an arrow aimed at the very core of Anglo-British custom-observance. Formal renunciation of this part of the symbol-heritage might encourage a more thorough formalism, and a lettered constitutionalism, the antithesis of royal magic. Republicanism thrives on precisely that tendency. Also, the Act of Settlement was a prelude to the Treaty of Union between the old parliaments of Scotland and England, five years later: the very hinge of the United Kingdom, and just as much of an anachronism.

It was recently reiterated in the Scotland Act 1998, an element of the New Labour dispensation, therefore, and meant to stabilise it. Decidedly, children should not be allowed to play with matches in this cellar.

But play they will. By 2007, the third centenary of union, the SNP will quite probably control the executive, and be seeking to repeal the old treaty. And there will be a growing number of English republicans who agree with them. Since no new constitutional settlement was allowed to precede devolution, it will have to follow it. The matter of Britain, in which most Scots have an overwhelmingly strong, and often personal, interest, could then be renegotiated on a basis of equality, along with the other countries and populations awarded places on the Belfast Agreement's "Council of the Isles".

Terrifying only to addicts of the great and the exceptional, such a process would seek to keep (and build upon) what matters to the common life of the archipelago. Republican in essence, it would surely dispel such 18th century phantasms once and for all.

Tom Nairn is research fellow in Irish and Scottish studies at the Unversity of Aberdeen. His latest book, After Britain, is published in paperback by Granta Books on January 16